Now that the first Bay Area World...

Now that the first Bay Area World Series is assured, San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos has raised hackles in Oakland by saying he may forego the traditional series wager between rival mayors.

“There’s nothing in Oakland that I want,” he quipped after the Giants beat the Chicago Cubs to advance to the series to play against the Oakland Athletics.

But in his gush of civic pride--Oaklanders might call it snobbery--Agnos may be passing up one of the season’s better bets, one that contributed much to the festivity of last year’s victory celebration for the Dodgers.

When the underdog Dodgers beat the Athletics last fall in five games, Oakland paid off with 30 gallons of a coveted export, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream. The windfall--in six flavors--fueled a City Hall party that went all afternoon, recalled Lydia Shayne, a press aide to Mayor Tom Bradley.

Guests numbered in the hundreds, from every city department and political philosophy.

“Oakland wasted no time,” Shayne said. “They called us and said, ‘When do you want the ice cream?’ and it was here. It was wonderful.”

Astronomers here are not exactly laying out the interplanetary welcome mats, no matter what the Soviet press is saying.

The once-conversative news agency Tass on Monday contained reports of aliens as tall as 13 feet landing near Moscow. The creatures, characterized by tiny, knob-like heads, were said to have descended from a disk-shaped saucer in a city about 300 miles from the Russian capital, whereupon the visitors took a brief walk through a park before disappearing again, according to the accounts.

But Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory, said the news was immediately considered suspicious. For one thing, no Russian scientists came forward with samples of the strange mineral reportedly left behind by the saucer. Not only that, but descriptions of the creatures just didn’t ring true.

“You would hope that anyone traveling hundreds of light-years through space to get to Earth would have a little more than a tiny bump for a head,” Krupp said. “Their brains must be in their feet.”

Disgruntled employees of Unocal, Wells Fargo Bank and four other major downtown corporations got a chance for revenge Tuesday as the chairmen and chief executive officers of those firms took part in a “dunk tank” to benefit United Way.

The event, kicking off United Way’s 1989-90 fund-raising campaign, featured an apparatus that dunks its victim as soon as a thrown ball strikes a target. Top officials from Security Pacific National Bank, Coopers & Lybrand, Johnson & Higgins and Pacific Telesis Group were among those taking a cold bath.

“It’s going to be a wet and wild campaign. . . ,” said Unocal’s Richard Stegemeier, chairman of the $30-million drive, after being dunked by one of his own underlings. How did he feel about it?

“Wet.”

Not long agoJ. Michon watched a frustrated woman throw a tantrum at a DMV office, yelling and waving papers, merely because she had waited in line for four hours. Now Michon and two partners have a company catering to just such impatience.

The name is nothing exciting--the DMV Registration & Filing Service, based in West L.A.--but the promise is perhaps exhilaration: You’ll never have to wait in a Department of Motor Vehicles line again.

Michon and his partners will do that for you, for fees ranging from $10 to $35. Best of all, they don’t charge by the hour.

“In this day and age, with hectic hours and people working, it’s very difficult” for most people to make time for DMV appointments, he said.

So far, he reports, clients seem grateful. Take the guy who signed up a few days ago. He had waited in a DMV line for half a hour and got nowhere. “He counted 44 people in front of him,” Michon said. “In half an hour they moved three people. He left. You can’t really blame him.”